Terms of Service

1. Acceptance of Terms

By accessing and using The Kinetic Alphabet (TKA) application, you agree to be bound by these Terms of Service. If you do not agree to these terms, please do not use the application.

2. Description of Service

TKA Composer is an educational platform that provides tools for learning, creating, and sharing TKA (The Kinetic Alphabet) sequences. The service includes sequence building tools, learning modules, and community features. Some features require a paid subscription.

3. User Accounts

You are responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of your account credentials. You agree to accept responsibility for all activities that occur under your account. You may not share account credentials or allow others to access your account.

4. User Content (Including Videos)

You retain ownership of any sequences, videos, images, audio, or other content you create, upload, or share using TKA Composer. By uploading or sharing content through the service, you grant TKA Composer a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, sublicensable license to:

• Store, host, back up, cache, and display your content
• Transcode, resize, compress, and re-encode videos, images, and audio for compatibility and performance across devices
• Generate derivative technical files such as thumbnails, preview frames, and lower-resolution versions for display purposes
• Sublicense the above rights to service providers (such as content delivery networks, storage providers, and hosting platforms) strictly for the purpose of operating the service

This license is granted solely for the purpose of providing the TKA Composer service and is limited to uses reasonably necessary to host, display, and deliver your content to the users and audiences you choose. TKA Composer will not use your private content for promotional purposes without your explicit consent.

If you share content publicly (for example, in browse galleries, community features, or public profiles), you grant an additional license for TKA Composer to display that content to other users and in promotional materials referencing the service. This public-sharing license continues after account deletion for content that has already been shared publicly, but you may request removal of your publicly shared content at any time by contacting us.

You represent and warrant that you have all necessary rights to upload and share any content you submit, and that your content does not infringe the copyright, trademark, privacy, publicity, or other rights of any third party. See Section 9 below for the DMCA notice and takedown procedure if you believe content on the service infringes your rights.

5. Acceptable Use

You agree not to:

• Use the service for any illegal purposes
• Attempt to gain unauthorized access to the service or other users' accounts
• Interfere with or disrupt the service or its infrastructure
• Upload malicious code or harmful content
• Upload content that infringes the copyright, trademark, privacy, publicity, or other rights of any third party
• Harass, threaten, or harm other users

TKA Composer reserves the right, but is not obligated, to remove, restrict, or refuse to display any content that violates these Terms or that we determine, in our sole discretion, to be harmful, inappropriate, or incompatible with the purpose of the service. We may take this action with or without prior notice. Removal of content does not limit any other rights or remedies available to us under these Terms or applicable law.

6. Automated Access and Data Extraction

You may not:

• Use bots, scrapers, crawlers, or other automated tools to access the service or extract data
• Systematically download, copy, or mirror content from the service beyond normal personal use
• Use the service's API or interfaces in ways not intended or documented
• Attempt to reverse-engineer, decompile, or extract the source code of the application from its hosted form

The TKA notation system and sequence data are open knowledge meant to be shared and taught. This restriction targets automated bulk extraction from the hosted service, not the knowledge itself. The sequence dataset is separately available under open license terms as described in the project's LICENSE file.

7. Competing Service Restriction

You may not use the service, its source code, or data obtained through the service to build, operate, or contribute to a product or service that competes with TKA Composer. This includes hosting a substantially similar application as a service for others.

Building personal tools, educational materials, or research using TKA notation is welcome and encouraged. This restriction targets commercial clones and hosted competitors, not the community.

8. Intellectual Property and Trademarks

The TKA Composer application, including its design, features, and underlying technology, is protected by applicable intellectual property laws and licensed under the Elastic License 2.0. The source code is available for inspection but is not open source.

"The Kinetic Alphabet", "TKA", "TKA Composer", and associated logos are trademarks of Austen Cloud. You may not use these names to imply endorsement, name a competing product, or create confusion about the origin of your work. Fair use for attribution (e.g., "compatible with TKA notation") is permitted.

The TKA notation system itself is an open standard documented under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0. Anyone can teach, reference, and build upon the notation with attribution.

9. Copyright and DMCA Notice & Takedown

TKA Composer respects the intellectual property rights of others and expects its users to do the same. If you are a copyright owner (or authorized to act on behalf of one) and you believe that content hosted on TKA Composer infringes your copyright, please send a written notice to our designated agent that includes the information required by 17 U.S.C. § 512(c)(3):

1. A physical or electronic signature of the copyright owner or a person authorized to act on their behalf
2. Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed
3. Identification of the material that is claimed to be infringing, with information reasonably sufficient to permit us to locate the material (e.g., a URL within the service)
4. Your contact information (full name, mailing address, telephone number, and email address)
5. A statement that you have a good-faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law
6. A statement, made under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notice is accurate and that you are the copyright owner or authorized to act on behalf of the owner

Send DMCA notices to our designated agent:

Austen Cloud
Email: austencloud@gmail.com
Subject line: "DMCA Takedown Notice"

Upon receipt of a valid notice, TKA Composer will expeditiously remove or disable access to the allegedly infringing material and take reasonable steps to notify the user who uploaded it.

Counter-Notice. If you believe your content was removed or disabled as a result of mistake or misidentification, you may submit a counter-notice to the designated agent above containing:

1. Your physical or electronic signature
2. Identification of the material that was removed and the location at which it previously appeared
3. A statement under penalty of perjury that you have a good-faith belief the material was removed as a result of mistake or misidentification
4. Your name, address, and telephone number, and a statement that you consent to the jurisdiction of the federal district court for the judicial district in which your address is located (or, if your address is outside the United States, the state or federal courts of Cook County, Illinois), and that you will accept service of process from the person who provided the original notice or their agent

Repeat Infringers. In accordance with the DMCA and other applicable law, TKA Composer will, in appropriate circumstances, terminate the accounts of users who are determined to be repeat infringers of copyright.

False Claims. Under 17 U.S.C. § 512(f), any person who knowingly materially misrepresents that material is infringing, or that material was removed or disabled by mistake, may be liable for damages. Please do not submit frivolous or abusive notices.

10. Subscriptions and Payments

Some features require a paid subscription. By subscribing, you agree to pay the applicable fees. Subscriptions renew automatically unless cancelled before the renewal date.

Refunds may be issued at the developer's discretion. If you experience a technical issue that prevents access to paid features, contact us and we will work to resolve it or issue a refund.

Free-tier functionality may change over time. We will provide reasonable notice before removing features from the free tier.

11. Code Contributions

By submitting code, pull requests, patches, documentation, translations, or other contributions to the TKA project repositories, you agree that your contribution is governed by the inbound-equals-outbound licensing terms described in the CONTRIBUTING.md file at the root of the repository. In summary:

• Your contribution is licensed under the same license as the file(s) you modify (MIT or Elastic License 2.0, per the root LICENSE file). You retain ownership of your contribution.
• You grant Austen Cloud the right to relicense your contribution under the terms of the Post-Mortem Open Source Provision (Section 7 of the root LICENSE file), which relicenses Elastic-License code to MIT and proprietary data to CC BY-SA 4.0 upon a triggering event.
• You represent that you wrote the contribution or otherwise have the right to submit it, and that it does not infringe the rights of any third party.
• You provide your contribution on an "as is" basis, without warranty.

See CONTRIBUTING.md in the repository for the full terms.

12. Disclaimers

TKA Composer is provided "as is" without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including but not limited to warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. There is no guarantee that the service will be uninterrupted, secure, or error-free.

13. Limitation of Liability

TKA Composer and its developer shall not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages arising from your use of the service, including but not limited to loss of data, loss of profits, or interruption of service. To the maximum extent permitted by law, total liability for any claims shall not exceed the amount you paid to use the service in the twelve (12) months preceding the claim.

14. Governing Law

These Terms are governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of the State of Illinois, United States, without regard to conflict of law principles. Exclusive venue for any dispute arising from these Terms or your use of the service shall lie in the state or federal courts located in Cook County, Illinois, and you consent to the personal jurisdiction of those courts.

This governing-law clause is intentionally aligned with Section 9 of the project's root LICENSE file so that the licensing relationship and the service relationship are governed by the same law. The individual software licenses referenced in the LICENSE file (MIT, Elastic License 2.0, and CC BY-SA 4.0) are governed by their own terms.

15. Changes to Terms

These terms may be modified at any time. Continued use of the service after changes constitutes acceptance of the modified terms. Significant changes will be communicated through the app or via email at least 30 days before taking effect.

16. Contact

For questions about these Terms of Service, email austencloud@gmail.com.

For DMCA notices and takedown requests, see Section 9 above.